SOME QUESTIONS FOR THE NEW SUPERCOMPUTER

Its name is Roadrunner, and will be located at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and it can do 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second, a world's record. A quadrillion is a billion millions, and looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000. Way too big of a number for me to contemplate, as are petaflops, the term used to describe the ability to perform one thousand trillion calculations per second. Brain-busting numbers indeed. Anyway, Roadrunner is the world's fastest supercomputer and the United States military's newest toy and it will be used, among other uses, to keep track of our nuclear arsenal and make sure the things still work as they age. It cost only $133 million, relatively cheap for a Pentagon purchase that fills twenty-one tractor tailer trucks. What's surprising is that they didn't buy a dozen of them for that price.

The military will also allow scientists to use Roadrunner as well, to figure out things like climate change, the nature of the universe and a lot of other stuff they've been wrong about. This will only happen for a short while before the military places the machine in a secure and classified environment, so hopefully the folks in the white lab coats won't waste this short window of opportunity asking it dumb questions. Nobody really gives a rat's ass about the exact size of the galaxy or the atomic weight of bauxite.

My very rough understanding of computers is that you load them with a ton of information and then let them figure stuff out for you and they can only operate based upon the quality of the information they're given, hence the term GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. If you tell a computer that two plus two equals five, it will never figure out that's not true. So one would hope that the Pentagon is very careful about who they let near this thing. Some of our most prominent scientists have been crying the blues lately over their failure to explain various things about the nature of the universe and you don't want those people feeding Roadrunner their whacky theories as if they were facts. What good is a quadrillion calculations a second if the machine thinks 2+2=5? That would only be a quadrillion mistakes every second or, in layman's terms, roughly equivalent to the daily production of errors made by our current government. I've got some better questions for this computer to figure out.

Let's ask Roadrunner if there is finite number of uses for Miracle Whip and set those advertising claims to rest once and for all. Maybe ask it why the car you bought averages 10 miles per gallon less than what you were promised. Or better yet, ask Roadrunner to explain the infield fly rule clearly and concisely, or to find out all the tax deductions you can get away with before the IRS audits you. Let this machine count the votes this November so we don't wind up looking like the old Soviet Union again after a national election with all those "heads-we-win, tails-you-lose" voting machines installed in swing states.

Ask the computer to calculate how long it will take to rid the airwaves of reality TV shows and the exact number of "Law & Order" reruns we can watch before we start thinking that Jack McCoy is a real person. How about asking it how is it that a lot of giant corporations continue to lose billions of dollars but can still afford to pay their CEO's a hundred million a year. Maybe even figure out how many billions MacDonald's has served, and how much lard-per-ass that translates into. Or maybe find out exactly how big Barry Bonds' head would have grown if he wasn't forced to stop taking steroids. Could he have eventually doubled as the team mascot, thus saving a bundle on the costume?

These are the things people want to know. Or if you want to get picayune and demand useful information, you could feed Roadrunner all the pertinent information about the earth's tectonic plates and how fast they are moving and which one rubs the other one the wrong way and in this way map out all the potential earthquake sites and when they will occur and ask the people living there if they might want to move. While this will be a big disappointment to headline writers and on-site reporters who love this stuff, it might save a lot of lives. On second thought, Naaah, who cares? What we really want to know is how to win the lottery and with all those quadrillion calculations per second we figure we might just have an edge.